Demonstrating the relationship between preparation and leader outcomes

Only recently, has the Evaluation Taskforce been able to generate findings to its most essential question: How and in what was does preparation matter for graduates’ leadership work? The collaborative work of multiple institutions and their faculty researchers have enabled the taskforce to finally aggregate results across institutions with sufficient numbers to statistically evaluate the relationship between program-level differences in program features and graduates’ outcomes.

The results of these analyses have been quite positive and presented at UCEA and AERA conferences (M. T. Orr & Pounder, 2007), and are being revised for publication in a special issue of Educational Administration Quarterly. They show that programs differ on graduates’ ratings across features and attributes, with a few programs rated highly on most features and a few programs rated highly on few or no features. These differences are positively correlated with graduate outcomes on what they learn and their career advancement outcomes (Orr & Pounder, forthcoming).

Analyses of the Stanford University data for graduates of four innovative preparation programs and comparison principals showed further results. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), researchers demonstrated that innovative preparation program participation was associated with better program and internship quality, which in turn was associated with more leadership learning, more frequent effective leadership practices and more school improvement work underway in schools (even when school context was taken into account) (M. T. Orr & Orphanos, 2008 forthcoming).

As larger program samples are pooled among participating institutions, the Evaluation Taskforce plans to replicate this research.